The great majority of video recorder/player apparatus presently on the market use large standard video cassettes having recording capacities of several (4 to 6) hours.
Some portable video cameras make video recordings using a recorder which is integrated with the camera and which uses miniature video cassettes. Miniature video cassettes cannot be played in most video recorder/player apparatus, however, and recordings made thereon must be re-recorded on tape of a standard video cassette in order to be used in such apparatus.
The magnetic tape in standard video cassettes follows a well-defined path as it must cooperate with drive, reproduction and/or recording members. As a general rule, a portion of the path is straight and elongated and extends adjacent one longer edge of the video cassette to ensure that the tape is exposed over practically the entire length of the cassette so as to enable a loading device to remove the tape from the cassette and place it against the recording and playback members when the cassette is in the operative position.
Since, by their very nature, miniature video cassettes are very much smaller than standard video cassettes, the magnetic tape which they contain does not have the same path arrangement as in the standard video cassettes, as a result of which they cannot be used in conventional video recorder/player apparatus.
Portable recorders using miniature video cassettes, accordingly, have not come into widespread use owing to the incompatibility of the miniature video cassettes with video apparatus intended for use with standard video cassettes.